- May 8, 2017
- 410
- 1,181
Patreon turned out to be a pretty flawed system. Obviously, from a certain earnings threshold, the author must give guarantees (like "update very 2 months") and then fulfill them. If guarantees are not met, funding is terminated. Otherwise, all these products in early access turn into outright parasitism.
None of these would work. Authors would game a system that demands them defining the "guarantees" and there would be endless yapping about "I meant this by that so the condition is met". And forget about a uniform process across all sites.All crowdfunding sites should do this
cause if only patreon does this a dev could just move to subscribestar
if this was implemented tho, devs would just put out short 1 scene updates every 2 months
but honestly i would love this
There is a solution.
For the first year, 50% of any paying-subscriber's monthly pay goes directly to the author, like now, but the other 50% is withheld until work is being released. About a week after work is released Patreon automatically calls all paying-subscribers since the previous release to vote on whether or not the newest work meets expectations (votes are weighted by how many months each voter paid across the interval). The vote is open for a week. If 50%+ of voters say YES, the author gets the other 50% in one big pay-off. Otherwise, the money is split across other Patreon authors, with paying-subscribers having limited control on exactly who gets it (so subscribers can't game the system as money always definitely leaves their hands and they can certainly punish this author but they can't control exactly who else gets the money so they must REALLY want to punish this author).
What happens after a year of not delivering? Paying-subscribers are called to vote on what share of their monthly pay still goes directly to the author: 50% or lower.
This system will GREATLY improve everything about this kind of financing and all thresholds can be tuned to be looser for authors that consistently meet expectations. Authors would be greatly incentivized to deliver often and according to the expectations they themselves set to grow their subscriber base. Voting can also be tuned to adjust the punishment depending on how unhappy paying-subscribers are.
Patreon just has to care about more than policing fantasies and getting their cut.
Last edited: